The secret to driving organisational change faster is not about having all the necessary resources or achieving full adoption of your new change initiatives. While it is important to have a structured approach, instead the critical key lies in reaching a “tipping point”. That critical moment when enough individuals truly embrace change and commit to adopting new mindsets and behaviours – thus causing a ripple effect that accelerates the change process across the entire organisation.
Driving organisational change is in its simplest form is taking the value chain approach from principles to practice. By developing a new culture perspective that embraces change can provide a multitude of benefits for individuals and organisations. This culture can be observed in how decisions are made – ‘Top-down’ or ‘Bottom-up’ – and whether your employees are confident enough to express independent thoughts (and feelings) without fear of being renounced for voicing their opinions.
As a Leader you must be resilient and stay the course! But it is often the nuances of leadership that impact morale and productivity of your employees the most. Small, iterative changes can quickly impact organisation culture, creating a refreshing competitive advantage – the hidden drivers with organisational change – when the influential factors or forces begin transforming the entire organisation. Learning to actively participate in change by recognising these drivers is crucial for staying competitive and relevant.
What are the three (3) types of Organisational Change drivers that determine success?
Change is instrumental to organic growth.
Organisational change drivers are factors that determine how likely a change initiative is to succeed and help you both manage and navigate change better, throughout your organisation. They can be internal or external, and can include economic, technological, social, site-specific, environmental, and regulatory factors.
By understanding each organisational change drivers, this ensures you can unlock a competitive advantage by categorising the forces affecting your organisation and develop more effective strategies for managing new change efficiently.
Change can be complex, due to the ever-changing challenges of organisational change and managing your employees mindset, throughout the process. This helps to simplify things as you begin to understand – How change works and all its complexities? and crucially; Why employees struggle to accept the transition of change and avoid unnecessary change fatigue?
The three (3) types of organisational change drivers are categorised as the following:
1. Developmental Drivers
Developmental change is the easiest to manage as it is primarily just an improvement of your “current state”. It does not need large-scale adjustments. These frequent changes aim to improve efficiencies and fix deficiencies, by enhancing existing processes and procedures.
Because these changes are gradual and non-disruptive, these small improvements accumulate over time and naturally benefit the organisation. They can also build on past project successes, which also reduces change resistance within an organisation. By keeping up with industry and changing market improvements, developmental change drives value, resilience, and prevents loss of market share.
2. Transitional Drivers
Transitional change is moving from a “current state” towards the “new state” to fix a clearly identified problem. This involves either modifying or replacing current elements existing within the organisation and transitioning towards a new phase.
If the “new state” or desired end state is clearly defined before starting the work, the change is transitional and does not require a major mindset shift. This type of change may sound simple because even though you have a clearly defined endpoint (in mind), you will need to strategise about your employees behaviour and mindset shifts required. It requires employees to emotionally move forward of previous methods or processes and adapt to new ways of working.
3. Transformational Drivers
Transformational change is driven by a need for organisation survival and the end state is not known at the start of the process. This type of change is extremely difficult to manage and requires your employees to undertake major mindset shifts. Transformational change is necessary because when survival is on the line, change is the only option to help revolutionise the organisation.
An example of transformational change includes Digital Transformation initiatives, which completely overhaul how an organisation operates, processes information, reacts to data insights and adapts to changing market conditions or perspectives.
How can Leadership positively affect recognising the drivers of Change?
Craft a vision and then plan for change.
The key drivers of change are the forces shaping the organisational landscape and leadership is crucial in both shaping and maintaining a strong organisational culture. Leaders set the direction for change, the drive with proactively setting the tone, values, and expectations within the organisation.
A positive Leader will inspire 100% effort from everybody! People are inspired by the vision. They want to follow a Leader who they feel model the behaviours and values that are important to them. But the key challenge for Leaders to navigate successful change is empowering team members to actively participate, help with the change contribution, embrace the new culture direction, and thereby creating a more vibrant (risk adverse) and successful organisation.
Signs of great leadership
The most effective Leaders know what matters most to employees and put their people first. Their leadership impacts organisational culture and strongly influences employee engagement. And that’s critically important because poor leadership is one of the most common reasons why employees leave their organisations.
So, what are some of the signs of a good Leader:
Visionaries and analytical (but strategic) thinkers
A Manager or Business Owner tells you what to do, while a Leader inspires you to want to do it. Leaders who lay out a vision that their employees “buy-in” and a strategy that they understand will naturally create a culture of engagement. They know where the organisation is headed, how it will get there and their role in helping achieve their vision.
Ethics that supports behaviour and values
Employees look at what you do and not what you say. Values are words, ethics are actions, and behaviours are boundaries. When Leaders demonstrate values through their actions, they lead by example and create an ethical culture across the organisation.
Empowerment to make decisions
There are three (3) essential requirements for making commercial decisions.
- Responsibility
- Accountability
- Authority
Leaders must empower employees to make decisions, which gives them the authority to act and make them take responsibility for consequences. This creates new leadership across all levels of the organisation and galvanises the new change direction.
Micromanaging disempowers the employee engagement process. With employees not entrusted to make decisions, there is minimal effort to voice an opinion or suggestions and therefore, negligible work gets done because all decisions have already been made.
AGILE translates into greater engagement and productivity
Being nimble, responsive, and change-ready is key to success. A new way of organisational thinking and working called agility. Organisational agility refers to a business mindset focused on delivering operational efficiencies by building proficiency and resilience into every aspect of operations from – management behaviours and strategy, through to workplace culture and design, the IT technology in current use and the processes in place.
Agility is the new commercial imperative
The benefits of organisational agility are simple. By being able to adapt quickly, this allows organisations to meet changing customer needs and expectations. Therefore, the need for greater agility is critically important as a wide range of internal / external drivers put increasing pressure on the leadership – to think differently and to initiate new change projects.
AGILE organisations strive to remain competitive and to survive the economic landscape. Data insights show that these types of organisations have better organisational health, higher employee engagement and improved productivity. Not to mention they have the leadership to guide infrastructure decisions, processes and new tools, and increased employee skills to tackle change, as and when it occurs.
These factors allow AGILE organisation to intuitively pivot due to:
- Competitive Edge – Understanding and responding to change drivers gives organisations a competitive edge.
- Adaptability – Recognising change drivers enables initiative-taking adaptation, intuitively pivot with disruptive change and reducing the risk of obsolescence.
- Innovation – Identifying change drivers fosters innovation, strategic intent, and the ability to seize new opportunities.
- Risk Mitigation – Addressing change drivers helps mitigate risks, be tactically more aware of business impact and associated with resistance to change from employees.
Summary
Culture change depends on micro-interventions – small adjustments to the structure, dynamics, or framing of interpersonal interactions – but applied consistently over time. The way to change culture is by changing the way individuals collaborate with one another. To change the ways in which people work together, Leaders must model the behaviours they want to see through their shared interpretations and across the organisation.
The leadership’s commitment to cultivating a healthy culture can create an environment where trust, respect, and motivation thrive. By leading by example, this fosters collaboration across teams and promoting innovation by providing new perspectives with their employees’ insightful contributions. Understanding and aligning with the organisation’s culture, values, and goals is essential for Leaders to make both a positive impact and avoid potential misalignment – a critical perspective with Change Management discipline and change initiatives.
So, make minor changes and approach culture change one (1) decision at a time. By creating minor changes, this can progress to bigger changes but as your organisation aligns with the change trajectory. Remember, every internal interaction that you have is an opportunity to move your culture towards the right direction!
Need some guidance on your next steps? Let’s start a conversation…